Ben Burchfiel is CTO and co-founder at Walden Robotics, a full-stack Physical AI company building and deploying general-purpose robots that continuously learn and improve while performing real industrial work.

Ben earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University before joining Toyota Research Institute.

At TRI, Ben served as Senior Manager and Lead of the Large Behavior Models division, pioneering foundational research in Diffusion Policy and LBMs that now powers Walden's robots, accumulating over 4,300 research citations.

Ben's work spans AI, machine learning, reinforcement learning, computer vision, and robotics, with research presented at top venues including RSS, CoRL, ICRA, ICLR, and AAAI.

Walden launched out of TRI in January 2026 and had robots performing real production work at a Toyota plant in North America within two months, backed by $300 million in seed funding at a $1.1 billion valuation.